"What's Your Favorite Movie?" -Episode 29 "The Films of David Lynch and the Cast of Twin Peaks" NOW AVAILABLE!

Our wonderful movie podcast is available on iTunes, Spreaker and by clicking the playable link below. In this episode, we discuss some of the films made by cast members of the cult TV series TWIN PEAKS which returns to television this month!

Listen to "What's Your Favorite Movie?" on Spreaker.

"What's Your Favorite Movie?" Episode 3 Now Available!

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Are you ready to put some more movie goodness in your ears!? Episode 3 of "What's Your Favorite Movie?" is now up and ready for your approval on iTunes, Spreaker and right here on WWOB. In this show, fellow blogger Elle drops by and talks about her love of movies especially some musical flicks like ALMOST FAMOUS (2000), MOULIN ROUGE! (2001) and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993). There's so much more good stuff in this episode that you'll just have to listen to it for yourself...
Help us out by spreading the word; Tell your friends and share on your social media! You can also help us out by subscribing or liking the show and leaving a brief (nice) review on iTunes! You can also leave a comment or make suggestions right here in the comments section, on Twitter @wyfmoviepodcast or e-mail at favemoviepodcast@yahoo.com

What ever you can do, Thank You So Much!

"What's Your Favorite Movie?" Episode 2 Now Available!

On the second episode of my podcast, What's Your Favorite Movie?, my good friend Kevin joins me to discuss not only his favorite films but also a few "classics" that I've dragged him to over the years. You'll also hear about some great old Baltimore area theaters and our most often quoted movies.

"What's Your Favorite Movie?" is now available on iTunes and Spreaker. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and comments are also appreciated! Thanks!

My New Podcast! "What's Your Favorite Movie?" Episode 1

I am excited to share with you all - MY FIRST PODCAST!

I've been wanting to do a podcast for years, but every time I looked into it, the process seemed way over my head. Well, a few weeks ago I decided I wasn't going to rest until I got somewhere with this podcast production dream and here I am with episode one!

The show is called "What's Your Favorite Movie?" -  each podcast will have a different guest and we'll discuss their favorite movies and why those films
are their favorites. Besides talking about the films themselves, I want to discover people's relationship with movies, stories and memories they have about movies, and explore the deeper role movies play in our lives.

I still have some issues to work out on the long term hosting and also distribution of the show, but for now the first episode is up and running. The first guest is my friend Grant, who I've known since we were 10 years old but I never knew he has such a passion of Star Trek, especially Star Trek II. We talk about his favorite movies and a little more on this premier episode.

I'm pretty happy with the way the first show turned out. It's a little sluggish in the middle but it picks up in the last third of the show. It's a learning process, so hopefully the show will get a little tighter and polished with each passing episode. Until then, I hope you'll take a listen and enjoy and even possibly share the show with your friends and followers.

I'll let you know when we are listed in iTunes and other Podcast Directories.

My Role in the Elmo Scandal

The other night around 11:20 I started getting messages through Facebook that people thought they had seen me on the news in Baltimore. It turns out, while doing a story on the Kevin Clash allegations, WJZ 13 used file footage of an event at Port Discovery children's museum including a shot of myself working with Elmo & Clash. We don't get Channel 13 where I live, but I just found the story online so I thought I'd share. Look for the very large fat guy in a purple shirt talking to an audience with Elmo. That was back in 1999, and perhaps about 100 pounds heavier...

The Time I Did A Photo Shoot With A Bunch of Bikini Models

There are a handful of stories from my college days that I look back upon and have to file under the heading "How In The World Did That Happen?" There's the time I found myself judging a beauty pageant, or the time I had ice cream at the Double T Diner with Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise, and the time I ended up at a veterinarian's office at 2:30 in the morning with a grieving family and their dead dog (but that story I'm saving for a screenplay). And then there's the time I did a photo shoot with a gaggle of bikini clad girls.

In the mid-90's I did a wacky Morning Zoo-style radio show on our college radio station. A good friend of mine, who we also considered the station's promotions manager, ended up getting us a promotional deal with a surf shop in Towson. It was something along the lines that if people went into the surf shop and mentioned the "Wacky Wake Up Show with Mr. Ed" they'd get some discount on some brand of suntan lotion...or something like that. They also gave the station prizes to give away on the air. We got the surf shop to give us free swimsuits for a few girls to wear to make a poster or two announcing our big deal! We all ready knew which girls on campus we wanted to recruit for our poster. A few of them had modeling experience, one of them was even Miss Teen USA (or something like that) and yes, some of them had work experience at Hooters on their resume. We had no trouble at all getting a photographer on board. A semi-professional photographer who took pictures for the school paper was happy to help out, and even supplied all the equipment and film.

Needless to say, it was a fun afternoon. I don't have any of the original photographs - as the photographer turned out to be a little too protective of the finished project. I did manage, at the time, to photocopy about a million copies of some of the pictures...

We shot these photos at the sports complex of our college. The second photo above was actually taken against the maintenance shed.

I don't know what's going on in that top picture, although you don't see me complaining. I always thought it was kind of funny that we used the sand trap at the golfing range to double as a beach in that picture. I'm sure you could tell we were on sand if I had the actual photograph.

Good times! I don't remember much else about the promotion except months later the surf shop tried to tell us that we owed them $300 bucks for the swimsuits!? They went out of business before we could resolve that dispute. But these blue tinted photocopies will live on forever!

The Down South Anthology

The other day I scanned in some of the posters and program covers for some of the plays that I had written and produced in the 90's to post on Facebook. I figured since I've got `em in the computer now I might as well share them here too...

In the fall of 1994 some friends and I got together and put together a little sketch comedy show called SUDS. There were some skits, some improv bits and even a little music. I wrote the majority of the comedy sketches. The guy on the cover of the program, sitting in the tub, is Bosko - a very old pre-Bugs Bunny Warner Bros. cartoon character. He had nothing to do with the show but we thought he looked good on the cover of our program.

Two years later, I had grown tired of auditioning for shows and always being offered tiny little parts. I was taking a Theatre Writing class at the time and decided that my final project of a One Act play was good enough to turn into a feature length play. So I gathered together some of the same people that worked on SUDS, we established ourselves as a theatre company..Down South Theatre Company to be exact, and we put on a show. A full fledged two hour plus play called Barn of Thought, which was also based on a column I wrote in our school newspaper. The show was about growing up and moving on from college and it incorporated many of the subjects that I had touched upon in my newspaper column. The show was a success.

For our follow up to Barn of Thought I wrote Brothers & Sisters, a comedy with several different storylines that involved all the siblings of a large family. We held auditions and rehearsals were a few days away when I decided that I didn't like the script at all. It wasn't very exciting. So I stayed up all night before the first day of rehearsals and morphed Brothers & Sisters into Cupid's Arrow. Cupid is really just a collection of skits with a slight framework around it. Several of the scenes from Brothers & Sisters ended up just becoming sketches in the new show. The artwork for the poster and program was done by good friend Grant. It's the only time we used original artwork instead of just clip art.

Even though Barn of Thought was probably a better written show, the production I'm most proud of is Sunburned. The scope of the production was bigger than anything we had done before. It was a musical, which meant singing...and dancing. We ended up having a live in-house band perform the music live each night. The show consisted of three original songs and five summertime classics. The script was nothing more than a modern version of an old Frankie and Annette beach picture but as the production rolled on through the month of July 1997, our audiences got bigger and bigger with each show.

The final stage production under the Down South name was 1998's Passport To Hawaii. A very silly show with plenty of stock characters, cliche' storylines and slapstick humor throughout. Although the show wasn't a musical, it did have four musical numbers and again some live music to add to the festivities. The original posters and programs were printed on a light green paper, but for some reason all I have is this master copy of the artwork.

After four theatre productions in a row, we moved our attentions to film and attempted to make the first Down South movie. In the summer of 1998 we spent 10 long hot days shooting "Bikini Academy" which was plagued with production problems right from the start. The movie features performances from many of the actors that we had worked with in our stage productions. Sadly, in the end, Bikini Academy did not turn out to be like anything we had hoped it would be. We had one (kind of sad) screening for the cast and crew and then dumped the film onto public access cable where it aired in two parts for a few years.

At that point, myself and a few others involved turned our attentions to a cable access comedy show we had started and left the theatre behind us.

You can read more about Barn of Thought and Cupid's Arrow in past posts.

This Cheese Sandwich is a Triangle

In addition to bringing you high quality retro-crap here at Wonderful World of Blog, I'm also on the review staff over at UltimateDisney.com, easily one of the best sources on the internet for information about Disney DVDs. My latest assignment was to review another instalment in the Baby Einstein library of preschool videos. The 24th title in the series is Baby Einstein: Discovering Shapes - Circles, Squares and More! Here you'll see videos of grilled cheese sandwiches, sailboats, boxes and lots of eggs all categorized by their shape. It's spellbinding entertainment. Anywho, click here for my review.

Library Video

My good friend Bill Rollins (who directed me in the still-unreleased thriller Past Demons) just completed a short film for a contest promoting libraries. Sounds like a dry subject for an up and coming filmmaker to tackle, but Bill's video is hilarious and very creative. Bill, himself, plays the role of the mayor in this production. The role was originally to be played by yours truly but I had to back out at the last minute. Now having seen the finished project, I'm very disappointed that I couldn't be a part of it.

Leave a comment for Bill either here or on YouTube and let him know what you thought of it.

Dog and Bunny - 10/23/96

It's been several months since we've had a visit from our good friends Dog and Bunny. For those of you late to the game, Dog and Bunny is a lame/bizarre comic strip I co-created in college that was purposely intended NOT to withstand the test of time! If you want to check out other editions of the strip, just type 'Dog and Bunny' into the blog search engine at the top of this page!
As as always, you can click on the comic below to enlarge it!

Hey Kids! Wanna Get a Picture with Your Nightmare?

When Disney opened EPCOT Center in 1982 they decided that Mickey Mouse and the gang were not going to be found anywhere in the park. There were no rides based on Disney movies, there were not Mickey t-shirts in the gift shops, and you couldn't find Mickey and Minnie walking around the park like they did at the Magic Kingdom. Instead the folks at EPCOT Center decided to have giant dolls from around the world (like this one to the right) three times the size of an average child roam the park for photo ops! Frightening...yes! Creepy....yes! Did I mention frightening!?

Little kids can get scared enough at a 6 foot tall Mickey Mouse standing in front of them, so I'm sure these 9 foot soul-less dolls prompted tears in many kids eyes. I'm not sure what country this dude is supposed to be representing except maybe Nightmareville! Is he supposed to be from England or Germany or what!? That's my younger brother and I in the picture with the mayor of hell, sporting our matching EPCOT Center t-shirts and bottling our fears long enough for the flash cube to pop on our parents camera. This picture was taken in December 1982, when EPCOT Center was barely three months old. The giant ambassadors of childish terror didn't stick around EPCOT all that long. When park visitors were disappointed that they weren't getting Mickey in a Disney theme park...they complained. Mickey and the gang eventually showed up in silver spacesuits with rainbows on them. I know I've got a picture of that somewhere...I'll have to dig it up for ya'll!

Giraffe

My good friend Bill Rollins has produced many short films and feature length productions over the years. In fact, he directed me in the feature film PAST DEMONS which is set to be released on DVD by Glass Ceiling Studios in first quarter 2007.

Here's a short film Bill made in 2000, also featuring me. It's called GIRAFFE and it's a movie trailer for a film that doesn't really exist. But it's very funny and creative and has plenty of fake mustaches and me playing an arms dealer. (What could be more ridiculous than me being an arms dealer!?)

Note: The language in this film is a little off-color. Let's just say the 3rd Commandment is broken.

Cupid's Arrow - 10th Anniversary

Following the success of our Summer `96 production of BARN OF THOUGHT,the Down South Independent Theatre Company returned to the stage the following winter to stage my second play, CUPID'S ARROW. This time with me in the director's chair as well. The cast included six members of the BARN OF THOUGHT cast as well as some new faces. CUPID'S ARROW doesn't tell much of a story, instead it's really a handful of skits supposedly all sharing the theme of love and romance. The skits are held together with a conversation between Cupid (Kevin McCrum) the god of love and Mars (Keith Mack) the god of war. It seems Cupid is quite the jokester, and illustrates for Mars the different ways he makes love fail. Along the way we meet Michael (Brian Kaiser) and Heather (Terri McHargue), a couple who's relationship has come to and end and then takes a very weird turn. We also meet a young cheerleader named Sally (Sara Nunally) who gets her heart broken by Jake (Brendan P. Hines) the coolest guy in school when he chooses the class flirt Slutty Bumpkins (Joy Watkins) over her. There's a ridiculous scene where Benjamin Franklin (played by me) accidentally kills his wife Deborah (Carey Dillon) during his famous kite experiment. We also had a scene that was a parody of the Michelle Pfeiffer movie DANGEROUS MINDS, where the teacher (Ariel Tucker) and one of her students (Gareth Kelly) just start getting it on on her desk after being struck by Cupid's Arrow.

The last two scenes in the play were a little more down to earth. One involved a guy (Brian Kaiser) having cyber-sex with a girl who ends up being his sister and the other was my lame attempt to be a little serious and romantic and end the show with a cute little skit about a nice guy (Gareth Kelly) winning the heart of a jock's girlfriend (Joy Watkins.) Then any actual sentiment I was able to work up was all tossed out the window for the final scene which was a musical number, just for the sake of having a musical number because I think all plays (and movies) should end with a good musical number.

The show was about an hour and 15 minutes long with no intermission. It was well received as people knew coming in that they weren't getting Shakespeare. Our scheduled short run of four shows was snipped to three when we cancelled the last show due to snow, but once again we all had a good time working on the show and pulling the whole thing off.


Those were great times, working with so many talented and fun people. It was alot of work directing my first play while also playing two roles in it but luckily in the second scene I was in one of my props was a magazine that I was holding. I ended up taping the script for the scene in the magazine and never really learning my lines, but with help I pulled it off.

One of the very talented people involved with the Down South Independent Theatre Company was Jen Wadford, who had worked on BARN OF THOUGHT and a sketch comedy show we had done years earlier called SUDS. Jen made costumes and props and kept everything together while the rest of us were trying to show off on stage. We also got alot of help and support from Catonsville Community College, where we produced the shows. Not only did they let us use the theatre for free, the drama department helped us out with lighting and other equipment for the theatre. Like I said, it was really a collaborative effort.

Here's a picture of all the females in the cast taken one night after a performance. The back row is: Terri McHargue, Carey Dillon in her musical number outfit, Julie DiPanfilo as the goddess Vesta, and Joy Watkins as Dawn. The bottom row is Ariel Tucker as Mrs. Johnson, Laura Keller as student #3 and Tammy Coffinberger as student #4.

The Down South Independent Theatre Company story continues this summer with the 10th Anniversary of our full-blown musical extravaganza SUNBURNED!

Power Rangers...Schmawer Rangers

My latest assignment from Ultimate Disney.com was a review for the latest Power Rangers DVD. In case you were wondering, they are no longer "Mighty" or "Morphin" but they still suck! I haven't paid any attention to the Power Rangers universe since the last movie was in theatres ten years ago. Apparently the show undergoes a cast and setting change every season. The current season, known as POWER RANGERS MYSTIC FORCE, tries to take the Power Ranger concept and cash in on the popularity of films like LORD OF THE RINGS and NARNIA. The result is crap! Lucky for me, I didn't have to write a full length review, just a few brief paragraphs for a larger Winter `06 DVD review. Anywho...take a look at my sarcastic review of POWER RANGERS MYSTIC FORCE VOLUME 2 LEGENDARY CATASTROS when you get the chance!